For the public it's a relatively minor issue except where you have both high levels of traffic and low level flights of the kinds of planes that use leaded av gas. Without that combination the effect on real gas levels are minor. Ideally we have no lead emissions of course but the effects are tiny if you don't have those two factors.
Only piston-engined aircraft use leaded gas. That rules out almost 100% of commercial passenger and military aviation.
Unlikely that there's enough of this type of exposure to be a real factor. Even this study finds that it affects children living within 500m of a civilian airport and that the level of lead detected was "not especially large."
There may be an argument for phasing out leaded avgas, as no amount of lead exposure is good, but it's not likely to have an impact on overall violence in an area, even assuming that lead has anything to do with that in the first place.
It doesn't seem like you're addressing the pollution/health effects to the population caused by burning leaded gas and the relative harm of that versus the benefit of keeping the existing fleet flying. Is that because the pollution is so small or that the pollution just is not relevant in your opinion?
Most planes don't need leaded gas. Jet-A / Diesel etc can also be used in planes. And yes, I understand small, old GA planes may be impacted, but this has been on the radar for decades now.
This comment makes me think you don't actually understand the situation. The vast majority of aviation fuel used IS Jet-A, which does not contain lead.
Small piston engine general aviation aircraft are the only ones that use leaded gas, and most of those can not use anything else that exists currently.
I too have a pregnant wife and a young child, but I worry far, far more about residual lead paint exposure than I do about avgas. Both get tested regularly and show no detectable levels (<2ug/dL), so that makes me feel like the risk exposure is acceptable. Yes, your quote about "no known safe level" is true, but at undetectable levels I'm confident it's in the noise along with all other environmental factors we don't know about.
If you're worried about lead exposure, are you testing?
True but leaded fuel for cars has been eliminated years ago. So this is now a major remaining source of environmental lead especially around small airports.
I used to fly 172s and I worried about inhaling the lead fumes and getting sprayed with it during the fuel drain checks. Lead exposure is cumulative and can lead to serious neurological problems later in life. And I've already had a fair share with my electronics hobby (soldering)
Yes and there's some areas near popular flight schools with significantly elevated lead levels because there are constantly planes flying overhead using leaded Avgas. It was a special carveout because recertifying every engine that was designed to use leaded gas is a pretty big lift and has significantly higher safety implications when the engine is in a plane instead of a car. It is only for some types of engines but those are more common on the older more affordable planes.
Private aviation in the US is still, somehow, allowed to use leaded avgas for small planes. It’s a small market but still enough to have an impact on the communities near airports. The FAA has shown little interest in the impact of the problem, and one can only hope the EPA will step in at some point. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
So, I get the frustration with bureaucracy. I'm an environmental engineer and I deal with analogies to this a lot. But to be honest, this seems like a non-issue to me either way. Like, sure, lead is bad, but one should take into account mass and concentrations before reaching for the ban hammer.
There are so few aircraft running leaded gas I can't imagine that environmental lead concentrations, could ever be at the right order of magnitude to be a problem for anyone(except probably AT airfields near fueling stations and maintenance areas). These aren't typically areas where children get exposed.
As a recreational pilot, this bugs me too. Every time I fuel the aircraft, or check fuel samples, or stick the tanks, I'm interacting with lead. I'm sure that the amount is small enough that I'll never notice any difference, but, I'd really rather not have the lead. I'm hoping for a lead-free Avgas sooner rather than later.
Just to make sure everyone is aware - this isn't a solved issue of the past. Airplanes continue to use leaded gasoline that, while much smaller relative to everyone's car running on it, contributes to higher than healthy lead in our environment.
Yeah, while there's no "safe" level of lead ingestion, not only do we not use leaded gas in cars, commercial aviation (with very few exceptions) does not use it either, and the private/general aviation piston-engine planes are emitting it several thousand feet in the air, not at street level around houses and people. We should get rid of lead in aviation fuel, but it's not a substantial source of environmental lead these days.
It doesn't actually accumulate in any particular area. There was a study done at at an airport that showed no particular accumulation at the airport. Leaded gas ends up poisoning the whole world a bit.
This "dilution is the solution to pollution" argument is the excuse the FAA uses for forcing everyone to use leaded avgas. This should be more of a scandal. The FAA is basically helping maintain a harmful oil company monopoly at the expense of the world.
This is not just about recreational aircraft. For example, 45% of the Canadian commercial fleet is piston engine based. Incidentally, Canada was involved in a test program with the FAA for leaded fuel replacements. The FAA recently dropped out of that program.
The article says that lead in aviation fuels (and in solder) is a far smaller contribution to current lead levels than remaining lead paint. In the grand scheme of things, there just isn't that much avgas used, and it gets dispersed widely as opposed to concentrated where people live.
I think the real problem is the big aviation piston engine companies (e.g. Lycoming and Continental) that seem to have no incentive to develop modern engines that can run on unleaded fuel. Newer engine manufacturers (e.g. Rotax, Jabiru) run fine on auto fuel, but they have a much smaller market. (It's sort of ironic that users of those engines, who should not be run on leaded gas, have a hard time finding unleaded gas at airports in the US.)
Yeah it's a problem because there is no money in light aviation and a lot of liabilities. And leaded aviation gas appears as a liability, especially to refineries.
There are increasing attempts to produce diesel aircraft engines. Complicated by there not being any money in light aviation.
That is the issue at hand in this story, but not really the comment I was replying to (at least primarily).
Leaded avgas is coming from piston-engine aircraft, and I don't think that was really what OP was talking about when commenting about the people flying private aircraft while publicly demanding people stop driving pickup trucks.
For leaded gas, we can simply ban the leaded gas, as the cost of performance in piston-engine aircraft. I'm not really an expert, but at a first glance I see no particularly compelling reason not to do it, so I'm not opposed to that at all.
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